On Blackout day, teach someone how to stop SOPA/PIPA - <AUTHOR> http://www.explainsopa.com/

<comment><USER2> Would be great to see a list of sites going dark on this page.

People can add their sites, the dates and a comment.

</comment><comment><USER3> We need to go on the offensive for internet freedom. Drop me an email if you're interested in helping to organize aggressive political action to support internet freedom legislation and amendments.

Let's move the 50-yard line in our direction.

</comment><comment><USER4> It is unfortunate that those of us who are not US citizens are going to be negatively affected by the blackout but are unable to take any effective action against SOPA/PIPA.

<comment><USER5> Unfortunate that it is harder for us to take action, yes. But we are very much affected by SOPA/PIPA anyway and even though I live in Europe going to the English wikipedia (etc.) site during the blackout will only make me smile.

We have our own laws to be afraid of so I certainly wouldn't mind localized versions of wikipedia going down as well, just to raise awareness.

(just taking wikipedia as an example)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A large part of my family is going to have no idea what is going on or why large parts of the web are dark. I imagine that will be true for many here.

It would be a good idea to have a form letter we can send to family and friends today that explains what is coming with links to places (like this one) where they can learn more.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I was explaining it to my girlfriend and to my parents over the weekend. There was almost no understanding there ahead of time. So let's build it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This doesn't teach anyone how to stop SOPA/PIPA. This teaches them why SOPA/PIPA is bad. If you want to learn how to stop SOPA/PIPA, try this:

[http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/better-activism- day...](http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/better-activism-day- january-18)

</comment><comment><USER8> Great idea, once you gain traction, feature some of the people who want to teach others. Glad to see so many startups taking action!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - great idea about the teachers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Couple of spelling errors in your footer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I've never been particularly good at spelling. All fixed.</comment></comment>


Fiery Eye of Sauron Stares Down San Francisco from Atop Salesforce Tower - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Eye-of-Sauron-San-Francisco-salesforce-tower-what-13353220.php <comment><USER2> I was looking down Post Street last night and saw it, but thought it was just flames, since it was at the wrong angle to see the eye itself. This is a lot more fun.

</comment><comment><USER3> Such an ugly building, the lights ruin the skyline, and this now adds a tonne of light pollution.</comment>


MongoDB: The Frankenstein Monster of NoSQL Databases - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mongodb-frankenstein-monster-nosql-databases-john-de-goes <comment><USER2> If the limitations of MongoDB's query facilities are getting you down, consider Couchbase. Couchbase supports JSON data natively, and has a very general query language called N1QL ("nickel"). If you know SQL, N1QL will seem very familiar.

[http://www.couchbase.com/n1ql](http://www.couchbase.com/n1ql)

I'm on the N1QL dev team and would be happy to answer any questions about the language.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank god for N1QL. MongoDB should study and emulate what you folks are doing, instead of inventing yet a 4th query language to pile on top of all the other crap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone have a benchmark of how current Postgres does against current Mongo as a key-value store?

<comment><AUTHOR> Take it with a grain of salt, but here:

[http://www.aptuz.com/blog/is-postgres-nosql-database- better-...](http://www.aptuz.com/blog/is-postgres-nosql-database-better-than- mongodb/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article is "praywalled"

</comment><comment><USER5> But it's webscale!</comment>


Happy 55th birthday NASA To celebrate, 97% of you get an unpaid vacation. - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/01/happy-55th-birthday-nasa-to-celebrate-97-percent-of-you-get-an-unpaid-vacation/

<comment><AUTHOR> Meanwhile, the President and Congress are still being paid to squabble over who else gets paid.

Apparently, the FBI and CIA are still being paid too.</comment>


Public US university has seen grades soar despite Covid. What's it doing right? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/01/georgia-state-university-covid-19-low-income-students <comment> just-juan-post Well most have threatened students with expulsion without a refund if they misbehave by gathering in large'ish groups.

That and many things are still forbidden by state governments.

Put those together and you have a recipes for staying at home and studying.

</comment><comment><USER2> Students have largely unsupervised internet access while doing their work.</comment>


The Unintended Effects of Driverless Cars - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/103583939320326217147/posts/TpN1g1oSVbN <comment><USER4> Guys, some of you who are criticizing the precise "assumptions" are missing the point! He's not saying that utilization will go up to 96% precisely, or that there will be 20x fewer cars. He is challenging us to imagine the possibilities ourselves, seeding it with some immediate (potential) implications. On first sight his assumptions seem reasonable, and it's up to us individually to determine what the ramifications are.

Indeed the potential is enormous for freeing up a lot of human time/etc. We will need less parking certainly, cars will be running newer models (since they're used more, they'll likely last less time) with better technologies, and potentially there will be more efficient routing algorithms to save energy, time, etc.

I like how HN is often first to criticize, but sometimes you're just missing the point. The point is to imagine for yourself the possibilities. For me, it's enormous.

<comment><USER5> Here's the problem I see.

The potential for car-sharing and an attendant rise in utilization rate has existed for a long time. (There's little reason something like Zipcar couldn't have been organized by telephone years ago.) Yet it has only caught on in a small way, and only in places where there are other overwhelming advantages to that scheme, in cities where car ownership (parking) is terribly expensive.

I think he's overlooking something regrettable but true: the low utilization rate, great expense, wastefulness and general economic insanity of private cars _are critical parts of their appeal_ to consumers. Many people who could commute by train or bus choose to take a car instead, even though it's hugely more expensive, more stressful, and often not much faster. They'd rather feel like they had some control than no control. They'd rather sit in a seat no strangers have been sitting in. They like knowing the glove compartment is crammed with their own crap and not someone else's. They like the fact that their car will be waiting _for them and for them alone_ in the parking space where they left it, with no need for waiting or a call-ahead reservation.

And of course there's the fact that parking an enormous, expensive, gas- guzzling monstrosity in the office lot or the driveway has a genuine (shallow, materialistic, emotional, and pitiably simian - yet still genuine) effect on your friends, neighbors, minions, and yes, on yourself.

He's supposing that _driverless_ cars will somehow finally yield to economic pressures that have been present (and irrationally resisted) all these decades.

<comment><USER6> I don't see the points you mentioned as the primary benefits of a car over a bus or train. A car requires no waiting, and takes you directly to where you want to go, with no stops or detours. A bus or train requires waiting, makes various stops, does not take a direct route to your destination, and drops you some distance away from where you want, perhaps with a couple of transfers required for long distances.

Car sharing programs eliminate some of the drawbacks (no detours or stops), but several still apply (no guarantee of timely availability, one or both endpoints does not coincide perfectly with your destination). On top of those, you also pay more than mass transit, and you still have to do the driving.

Give me a transit mechanism which picks me up from my house at the time I want to leave, and takes me directly to my destination with no stops, and I see no reason to ever drive a car again.

I certainly believe that some car enthusiasts exist who actually driving, rather than just doing it to get to a destination. However, I don't believe those people make up the majority of drivers, or even a significant fraction; I think most people just want to get from point A to point B, and driving sucks the least for them.

<comment><USER5> _A car requires no waiting, and takes you directly to where you want to go, with no stops or detours._

I think that after a moment's thought about this you'll have to agree that this is completely wrong. _The roads_ don't even _go_ directly where you want to go, most of the time; there are stop lights and stop signs and police checkpoints and emergency vehicles and slowdowns and gridlock and accidents and construction detours and traffic detours and "stops on the way" that aren't, really, for your spouse and on and on.

Which I think is really telling. The feeling of being in control that a private vehicle gives one changes one's perceptions and evaluations _a lot_. A driver-less car will probably not offer that illusion, and we collectively love that illusion.

Interestingly enough, the article attached to this other current HN post (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3329676>) points out how much we humans hate passive, helpless waiting, and how we tend to exaggerate its severity.

<comment><USER6> Mass transit mostly fails to avoid all the same things you mentioned; to the extent it doesn't (trains) it exaggerates the other problems (drops you off far from your destination). Also, half the problems you mentioned go away with driverless cars.

So, no, I disagree entirely.

<comment><USER5> _Mass transit mostly fails to avoid all the same things you mentioned..._

But... so what? This isn't about private cars vs. mass transit. This is about unthinkingly exaggerating the virtues of private cars. We all do it, all the time.

 _...half the problems you mentioned go away with driverless cars._

That's what was claimed about parkways, thruways, expressways, and later about the interstate freeways, and none of those problems have in fact gone away at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A couple of comments:

 _And if cars are receiving 20 times more actual use, that would imply that there would be 20 times less cars sold_

Actually, no it wouldn't. If cars are getting 20 times more use they will wear out much more quickly than they do now. That means cars will have to be replaced much more frequently. There would be fewer cars sold than there are now, but it wouldn't be 20x fewer.

 _The operating percent of a car will go from 4% to that 96%_

This seems wildly optimistic to me. The driverless cars may be capable of driving around 96% of the time, but that doesn't mean they can be carrying people 96% of the time. No matter how efficient the system, if there are enough cars to handle peak traffic during the day, then a lot of those cars will be sitting around doing nothing at night.

<comment><USER8> _If cars are getting 20 times more use they will wear out much more quickly than they do now._

Existing cars, if driven 20 times as much, would wear out 20 times more quickly, like taxicabs do now.

But it's also possible that cars would simply be built with more reliable components and more durable materials, like current aircraft and public transit vehicles are.

It's not cost-effective to build an ultra-reliable car that's sitting idle 96% of the time, but the economics would surely change if the utilization rate is much higher.

<comment><USER9> cars wear out from two things 1) age 2) use A car, left sitting in the driveway for 30 years, unused and unmaintained, is unlikely to work very well or for very long. Rubber components like hoses, wire insulation, weather stripping etc become brittle and break.

As some other posters mention, cabs with 650,000 miles are not unheard of. I had a Toyota Landcruiser with 450,000km on the second engine, over 900,000km on the body.

A car that got 20x use would not wear out 20x as fast because a large part of a car wearing out is just age, not miles.

<comment><USER10> Here's a story about a guy (a friend of my brother) who put a million miles on a Honda accord:

[http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2199&dat=20021117&...](http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2199&dat=20021117&id=mJwyAAAAIBAJ&sjid=D-kFAAAAIBAJ&pg=3412,4194471)

He took extremely good care of it.

<comment><USER11> There's a Volkswagen Gol here in Uruguay with a million kilometers, and it's not an unheard-of amount

Cars are the most expensive in the world here, so we tend to keep then way long past their expiration date - as an example, I own a 1994 Maruti with 200.000 km, they aren't designed to last that long ! Japanese cars are the most coveted because they do last a million kilometers if cared for properly.

Sadly, there's a ban on used car imports (The vice-president's campaign was funded by the new cars importer association).

<comment><USER12> A million kilometers is considerably less than a million miles. A million kilometers is about 621 thousand miles. That's a lot, but it's much less than a million miles.

<comment><USER13> Do you seriously believe there is any regular reader of Hacker News that doesn't know that a kilometre is less than a mile?

<comment><USER11> With my comment, I just wanted to add one more anecdotal point :)

I'm aware of the difference between miles and km (though I instinctively tend to minimize it and believe the difference is less than it really is)

I know of that Volkswagen because a million km is headline-grabbing here (on the "anecdotes" section), there are probably cars with a million miles but 1,609,344 km is not a headline-significant number, much like 621,371 miles isn't for the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox>

As the efficiency with which a resource is used increases, the tendency is to use more of it rather than less.

Concretely, if I don't have to drive the car myself, I wouldn't hesitate to drive anywhere. I'd go to the city every day if I could read on the way, and sleep on the way home.

<comment><USER15> With shared resources, this might not be the case.

Today, car owners have already spent $x on their cars -- so they have an incentive to use their investment to the fullest.

Compare that with a shared-car system like ZipCar. ZipCar is generally much more efficient than owning a vehicle (if you don't use it to commute) -- however, since you pay per hour, you have an incentive to skip the car when it's not necessary.

By removing the sunk-costs of ownership, you could incentivize conservation rather than consumption.

<comment><USER16> With ZipCar, you have to first get to the car, and then also get back from the car. For most people, the car they own is in their driveway or parking spot.

<comment><USER17> With a model more like Car2Go (pick up the car wherever you can find one, leave it wherever you want to) this isn't as much of an issue. In Austin there's pretty much always a car within a few blocks... almost "driveway- level" accessibility.

And if even 10% of drivers switch to using this model, then there's always going to be a car on your block. That's pretty competitive.

With driverless cars it's even less of an issue, because the car will literally drive from the end of the block (where it's waiting) to your door.

<comment><USER18> Thanks, I wasn't aware of Car2Go. Their price rates <http://www.car2go.com/sandiego/en/affordable-rates/> might give a good idea about how expensive using a driverless car would be if it existed today.

Assuming, that the San Diego prices can be applied to Francisco, it seems like taking such a car from downtown to the airport would be about the same as the BART subway. I assume, that would be too expensive for a daily commute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There's another unintended effect I haven't seen talked about anywhere: when cars no longer require human drivers, the cost of driving in human terms (time, frustration, danger) will be drastically reduced, but the energy cost will only be reduced by a small amount. The logical consequence of this is that cars will be doing a lot more driving and as a society we will spend a lot more energy on transportation overall.

<comment><USER20> While this concept sounds amazing to me, lets not forget that we are not the majority. I just got off the phone with a relative who hates taking a plane, they would rather drive 24 hours to their destination. I consider this concept to be pure insanity, but i don't think this is limited to a small portion of the populous. There is much more at play in the mind of the 'average American(in this case)' than efficiency and 'the car will drive for me'. The lack of a feeling of person control is not among the lesser of these issues.

<comment><USER21> _i don't think this is limited to a small portion of the populous._

I do that.

But it's not because I hate planes but I've got three kids. Airfare for five to visit grandma in Virginia is prohibitive compared to the cost of driving.

I'm not a nut about it: if it's just my wife and I, we fly.

But on those long drives especially, I'd love a car to do the driving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm not sure if anyone else has realized it yet, but driverless cars will have to be taxed on a time-on-road basis, rather than at a flat rate.

The reason? The economics of electric cars and parking.

Initially it seems that they will fix the parking problem - driverless cars can be sent to park outside the CBD, reducing traffic and freeing up space.

But the problem is that people/software will optimize for _price_ , and for electric cars the cheapest scenario is for them to be stuck in a traffic jam on a public road.

Instead of going to a parking bay, the software will route them to the nearest traffic jam, where the car can sit with the electric motors off for a large amount of time. Inevitably, some software will misjudge how long their charge will last, their batteries will run flat and the traffic jam will get worse.

As far as I can see the only way around this is to increase the cost of being on the road.

<comment><USER23> Maybe not.

If you made it a flat fee, then it's kind of like runs-batted-in. The car has to get more people delivered to make money, so once it gets you to where you need to go as efficiently and quickly as possible, you get out and it speeds off to complete another fare.

Increasing road-cost would have the opposite effect, I think. If the cars make money just by being on the road and not by completing tasks, they lose the incentive to finish and jam-sitting becomes optimal.

<comment><USER22> Yes, I agree this could be an option.

But I'm not optimistic about the share-car thing, at least in cities without a strong existing public transport system. In most cities too many people travel at rush-hour, with unique route requirements (dropping kids at school etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Unfortunately there are a few assumptions being made here that don't really jive with car usage in practice. 96% usage? People's schedules aren't that flexible, my spouse and I commute at the same time to different places, and a large chunk of the people in my apartment do as well. This is known as rush hour.

<comment><USER25> Not to mention that driving places, without actually driving people places (ie, back home to drive the wife) effectively doubles the mileage, and thus my gas (or the energy source du jour's) consumption.

edit: Also, to build on the above comment, the benefit of having a car is having the freedom to use it when you want, it's always there. Driverless cars always in motion are basically public transit. Just take the bus/taxi/subway already.

<comment><USER26> >Driverless cars always in motion are basically public transit

Minus the cost of the driver.

The point of ubiquitous driverless cars, is that one could get to you so quickly that for all intents and purposes it _would_ always be there.

Also they don't always have to be in motion. Just give people a discount on service if they let cars park in their driveways while waiting for instructions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Driverless cars are a great idea and I really want to see them succeed.

But I can see more than a few problems. As they say, there are entrenched interests that won't like that. For example, if you can rent cars that way, I don't see the people with those very expensive taxi medallions being any too happy about that. Yes, getting rid of that would be a good thing, but the people who own them won't be any too happy about the value of their investment vanishing.

Also, there's what happens with accidents. For example, look at that story we have right now about the autopilot flaking out for what? A minute? Only to have the pilots get confused and crash the plane. People underrate intentional risks because they feel that they have control. Conversely, they overrate risks where they do not have that feeling. Driverless cars are firmly in the "don't have control" pile. Sure, the computer is likely to be a much safer driver than most people, but that also means being a nicer driver (which will _really_ piss off some people, passengers and other drivers alike), and people with low skill overrate their abilities. Throw in any actual programming errors into the mix and I just have to hope you have good insurance and a good PR department.

</comment><comment><USER28> My first thought about driverless cars is that stock in alcohol companies would skyrocket. I know a good many people who would go to the bar on a more regular basis and now that they have a driver for the ride home. Also on a week day after work, why not have another beer? No risk of hurting someone or a DUI, right?

<comment><USER29> America needs to get back to its roots as the premier boozing nation. We were long known for this. Hell, there was practically a civil war over the whole whiskey rebellion thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I was young and naive I used to dream about how a Personal Rapid Transit system that would whisk people around in private little pods along elevated monorail tracks could work. Clearly the answer is "it couldn't", not so much technically but economically and politically.

But it turns out we already have a really comprehensive network of ground- level "tracks" that lead up to nearly every residence and business on the planet. The missing ingredient thus far has been the ability for a vehicle to stay on this "track" without a driver, but it looks like Google and friends might have cracked that nut.

A second impediment might be powering these cars in an efficient manner, but batteries have vastly improved over the last decade, and as they are standardized, battery swapping and even third-rail-type power (at least on limited-access roads) become possible.

The land use implications alone are going to be huge, but I'm not entirely sure which way they'll flip.

On the one hand, we will no longer need vast parking lots adjacent to activity centers like malls, stadiums, office complexes, big-box stores, and airports. That means that stuff could be built in those parking lots, which could potentially greatly increase the density of current cities and suburbs.

On the other hand (h/t Karl Smith at Modeled Behavior) driverless cars would dramatically lower the cost of living in exurban areas, so people interested in peace and quiet would no longer have to compromise as much as they do now.

</comment><comment><USER30> I expect that at peak use (rush hour), the total number of cars needed would not be so substantially lower than the current number of cars owned. Perhaps a factor of 2 or 3.

Of course, with driverless cars, people may begin to stagger the starting / ending hours of the work day to allow for owning fewer cars.

<comment><USER31> That's true but consider that most of those people go to/from the same place.

If entity that provides those cars is big enough, they can match up the destination and optimize the traffic so that people going to the (roughly) same place share a car. When I was commuting from SF to MV for work, I had to use the whole car. There were plenty of other people who were commuting at the same time from/to very similar destination and used the whole car. It's not hard to algorithmically put several such people into the same car.

Today cars are 4/5 seaters so you get at 3x reduction compared to current levels (taking into account that not everyone drives by himself today) but you could easily redesign the cars to not be much larger and taking 8-10 people. Or make them straight up buses. Google already does that with their shuttles where they pick e.g. people from SF and drive them in big buses to MV, except it would be much more efficient because the potential pool of people transfered would not be just "people who work at Google and live in SF" but "every person who lives in SF and works somewhere in MV", which is a much bigger number.

<comment><USER32> Although I agree with your argument, I think it actually _is_ algorithmically hard to do this.

Isn't this the travelling salesman problem?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem>

Of course, a non-optimal, but good enough routing is probably fine.

EDIT: Added last sentence.

<comment><USER31> As hard as it might be, it's a solved problem. FedEx is doing it. Uber is doing it. And I'm sure there are plenty of others out there, I just don't know about other industries.

<comment><USER33> If I'm understanding the relevant WP articles correctly, the travelling salesman problem is not solved, since a solution for it would also imply a solution for all NP-complete problems. What these companies have therefore cannot be an absolute solution, but rather an optimal approximation which may or may not (but probably isn't, and probably can't be proved to be in polynomial time) equal to the absolute solution.

Of course, I don't have much firsthand knowledge of computational complexity myself, so someone else who know better should call me on any nonsense above. =D

<comment><USER31> Since you decided to nitpick: travelling salesman problem (i.e. finding an minimal route) is a solved problem as in "for decades we have known algorithms to find a minimal path and we teach them to CS grads".

What you refer to is the fact that the computational complexity (i.e. time to finish it) of known algorithms rises exponentially with the size of the problem and exponentially is a code word for "really, really quickly". It just takes too much time to find the minimal path if your graph is big.

What I meant, however, is that the problem has been solved in practice. When you ask Google how to drive from SF to NY, it'll give pretty good answer in milliseconds. Is it an optimal answer? It might be, it might be not, but it's a very good answer. Getting slightly better answer is not worth the computational time because it won't make a difference in practice in your trip.

Similarly, a car rental company doesn't have to schedule things optimally, they just have to schedule things really good, and that's possible with much less computationally expensive algorithms. The big win is when you go from "no optimization" to "good optimization", not from "good optimization" to "perfect optimization".

<comment><USER34> > What I meant, however, is that the problem has been solved in practice. When > you ask Google how to drive from SF to NY, it'll give pretty good answer in > milliseconds. Is it an optimal answer? It might be, it might be not, but > it's a very good answer. Getting slightly better answer is not worth the > computational time because it won't make a difference in practice in your > trip.

That's not the traveling salesman problem, it's the shortest path problem, for which polynomial-time algorithms are well-known and taught to first-year computer-science students. (To be fair, driving directions do require coming up with good edge weights on the graph composed of the American highway system, but once you've got weights, you can run Dijkstra's algorithm and you're done. That's probably not how GMaps driving directions work, but the point is that driving directions are not TSP.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I don't think the article's argument justifies the idea that fewer cars will be sold.

Cars wear out primarily through driving. If you simply switched to automatic driving, what you would have is fewer cars being driven more often and so being worn more quickly. If car-mile consumption stays the same, new-car production would stay the same. On the other hand, if the auto-drive cars increased carpooling, then you'd see a decrease in car-miles consumed and so a decrease in production. But if auto-drive cars drove around empty more, you might have even more car-miles being consumed.

Moreover, you'd have a "big bang" where people decide to mostly stop driving the old, non-automatically-driving cars and so there'd a huge spike in consumption at that point.

The space saved by avoiding parking could be really large, still.

A nice thing would be that at the start, a person might be able to finance their self-driving car by renting in out when they didn't need it. Those economies might make the phenomena spread really quickly.

<comment><USER31> The article might not but I think that it would totally happen.

My assumption here is that there would emerge a big car provider who would provide those cars, similar to how there's only few major car rentals, or how ZipCar is leading in its category or even how Uber emerges as a single taxi- like provider. The economies of scale are very big here.

Given that, some things you have not accounted for:

Higher average utilization per car. I don't know how much commute traffic accounts for total traffic, but by judging rush traffic on 580, it's quite a lot. Most of those people go from the same location (e.g. SF) to the same location (e.g. Mountain View) and today most of them drive alone. Today 4 or 5 of them would be scheduled by an algorithm to use the same car.

Because of that the cars would get re-designed for a higher capacity (at least 8-10 people) or even straight up buses. A big provider would have so much data that they could optimize the hell out of sharing cars.

Similarly, the cars would utilized, on average, much better. Again, a company with enough data could really optimize for a lifetime of a car and they would have economic incentives to do so (unlike a single customer for whom even gathering the necessary data would be cost prohibitive).

Our cars are, without a question, utilized very inefficiently. Someone operating a fleet of tens of thousands of cars would have not only economic incentive but also necessary data and necessary transaction volume to optimize per-car utilization, because for them it would translate directly into large savings.

<comment><USER26> I can't upvote this enough, people seem stuck in their concept of what a car is. Without a driver we are free to redesign cars in so many ways.

We no longer need to worry about designing it so that the driver can see every angle, so we can design more efficient seating layouts. We can even add partitions so the 10 passengers don't have to see each other.

Long distance deliver vehicles can operate at lower fuel efficient speeds.

We can combine delivery and passenger vehicles.

The list is endless.

<comment><USER35> Now wait a minute...

While I'm all for your point that drivelessness will allow an incredible re- imagining of the automobile, considering the gp responded my original post, I just want to bring things back to the question of resource utilization.

The automobile today is half efficient transport and half personal expression/personal entertainment. And the personal expression/personal entertainment part is where the massive resource utilization comes in. So, sure, you could reimagine the automobile for super-efficiency with four-people per car whenever you're driving and the resource utilization goes away - <USER2> does the personal entertainment/personal expression stuff. So you could go multiple ways. Towards a super-efficient taxi and towards an office/living room on wheels. The first way would involve less resources consumed, the second would involve less resources consumed. It is hard to be certain what the net outcome will be.

<comment><USER26> I think the natural progression of driverless cars is away from individual ownership. Why own a car when you can have near instant availability of a much cheaper rental.

To many people, a car becomes part of their identity, or like you said

>expression/personal entertainment

I'm sure that there will still be people for whom this is true, but for most of us it won't matter b/c the efficient always there taxi will be _so_ much cheaper.

For most middle to lower-middle class Americans I think current cars are really out of their comfortable price range, they own them b/c they view them as a requirement.

If you give them an alternative that is just as convient, but cheaper, and without the maintenance hassles, it's no contest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> What this seems to ignore for me is the car-as-status / car-as-identity case. Speaking personally when I had to trade from a rather nice executive saloon to an MPV / minivan, much as I knew it was sensible I hated it because of the self-image connotations. Which is possibly why I've now got a 350Z ;-)

Why does anyone buy a BMW or a Mercedes when a Ford is substantially cheaper for the same space and performance? Image. That's a sector which is always going to buy their own cars rather than leasing one from a pool, because even a shared 'prestige' car (a rather meaningless tag given current BMW sales figures, but I digress...) starts rapidly losing its lustre.

Which then may well mean that we gain a new social stratification - <USER3> car, own car, driverless pool car. Which could well see older used cars and taxis dropping out of the market, but I doubt it'd have an effect on the general car market on quite the same scale that the writer envisages.

<comment><USER37> Maybe, but I suspect that the order of adoption might change that. I agree that there will probably always be a segment of personal cars, but that segment will be small and shrinking. Speaking from the other side of the fence: if I still lived in a zipcar city, I'd be rid of my car in a heartbeat. I always considered my lack of car ownership as a positive status symbol.

One sort of person who buys prestige cars* would be the same sort of person to be an early adopter of personally owned driverless cars, after all, being equipped with the latest magical technology is one of the things that confers prestige. Once that has happened, membership of an exclusive car-sharing club might become desirable, offering the opportunity to network and do business on the move. After all, people do buy first-class tickets on trains, despite the massive expense, regardless of the fact that it gets you there at the same time as standard class.

I could also envisage a future in which personal car ownership is often seen in the same light as the ownership of certain models of car (e.g. porsche boxster) are today - i.e. a gauche attempt at a status-symbol by a nouveau riche oik.

*(The other kind, who wouldn't go driverless, are the kind of petrolhead who relishes the man-machine hybrid that they become when they get behind the wheel, but they will eventually be restricted to racetracks)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Hacker News side note: it's time to show plus.google.com instead of google.com in the domain preview.

Apparently it's already done with appspot.com, wordpress.com and others, so it shouldn't be too hard.

</comment><comment><USER39> One unintended effect is that accidents are going to be quite different. Although driverless cars are bound to be safer, I wonder what people's reaction will be to computer error causing death. The style of computer error is not likely to correspond to reasonable human factors (like bad conditions, icy roads etc - all that can be programmed in), but bugs / bad radar echo zones / new roads not yet mapped etc - there are going to be deaths caused by circumstances that a human would have easily, safely dealt with.

</comment><comment><USER40> The post is misleading, people do not have multiple cars because they cannot drive, it is because they have to use it for multiple things at the same time. Morning going to work, dropping kids etc. will happen all at the same time. Peak car usage will not be affected by self driving cars.

<comment><USER41> That is true, but the times can be shifted if the car can drive back after dropping you off.

For example: 1\. Drive to work 2\. Drive home 3\. Drive to school 4\. Drive home 5\. Drive to store ...

Many parents already drop their kids off @ school and thus are adjusting their schedules appropriately.

<comment><USER42> You're going to increase your fuel bills dramatically driving ack and forth like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Ars Technica did a good series on self-driving cars where they came to many of these conclusions already.

[http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/10/future-of- driving...](http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/10/future-of-driving- part-2.ars)

</comment><comment><USER44> I think I've missed an important part of this discussion -- if driverless cars would be revolutionary, what do they provide that an existing taxi service doesn't?

A taxi has many of the listed benefits;

\- you don't need to buy the car \- you don't need to drive the car \- it's available on demand through your phone \- the utilisation of cars is very high

So what is the functional difference between a shared-ownership, driverless car, and a standard human-driven taxi?

<comment><USER45> You don't have to pay the driver. Currently it's more expensive for me to take a taxi (in Australia) because the wage of the driver outweighs the extra costs (and inefficiency) associated with running my own car.

You see a lot more taxis in cities with lower human labour costs (such as Lima), or where the cost of parking outweighs the cost of the driver (such as Manhattan).

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> How has no one mentioned EC2 in this whole thread?

Automation, centralization, capacity planning, many of the problems are the same.

Now IF that analogy is correct I propose:

1\. A few large entities will dominate the automated car business while enthusiasts and finicky users will happily continue to buy their own.

2\. Manufacturers will see demand explode for a small set of highly efficient commodity vehicles.

3\. Excess capacity will be resold for new businesses.

\- Package delivery \- Mobile Advertising \- Portable infrastructure. (Need wifi coverage at an outdoor event? I'll send over a half dozen networked cars) \- Portable storage (Think of those delivered storage pods, but that only were there when you called) \- Entertainment (Rent a dozen cars and have them do some sweet driving)

Also, though this doesn't fit into the Amazon analogy, talk about a captive audience! Imagine, you're puttering along on a family trip to Yellowstone in your rental, it's around lunchtime, and the car suggests stopping at Burger King .. out loud ... with your kids listening. Can you imagine what BK would pay for that privilege?

</comment><comment><USER47> While this is a fascinating thought experiment are there really so many people who think there will be mass adoption of driverless cars in the near to mid term?

The technical, political, socialogical, and psychological barriers to the OP vision seem huge. Just to mention one that I haven't seen mentioned: winter driving. In snowy climates the driving conditions are very unpredict able. Cars get stuck and require all sorts of creative driving techniques. If the sort of seamless automatic driving doesn't work in such an environment then human driven vehicles will still be on the road in large numbers. Being on the road means they can be driven to the dense, warm urban areas where automated driving might work better.

You could outlaw human driven vehicles in certain places, but it highlights the need for the creation of parallel infrastructure to be created in areas where land is scarce. The transition period would be stretched out and chicken vs egg type problems could be insurmountable for the foreseeable future.

</comment><comment><USER48> I can't believe this has so many upvotes! This is based on a silly assumption; aircraft are relatively more expensive than cars to buy, maintain, and use. So it is cheaper and affordable for more people if we time share them.

Cars are much cheaper, so we don't - the value of having a personal car ready _right now_ is worth more to people than taking public transport. If aircraft were as cheap/convenient as cars to use/maintain/store/etc, then I'd have an aircraft parked up outside my house!

Driverless cars will have an enormous effect on society in lots of ways, but I highly doubt reducing the number of cars on the road will be one of them. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there are more cars on the roads, given that people who currently can't drive (because they're elderly/too young/disabled) will be enabled to.

</comment><comment><USER49> How about employment? It will make millions of jobs disappear. Truckers/taxi drivers/bus drivers/etc. make up a pretty huge group of people.

<comment><USER50> Aren't you making a Luddite argument?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite>

Different jobs will take their place. There are a lot fewer farmers these days, for example. The real trick is to find effective ways for people to get the training.

<comment><USER51> if somebody has worked most/all of their life in a low-education unskilled labor job (the kind that are most likely to be disrupted by computers), who says they even have the ability to become a robotologist or something very intensively knowledge based? In the future these will really be the only kinds of jobs computers cant do. The problems here are much more complex than the Luddite issues of yesteryear, and its disingenuous to write somebody off as a dumb Luddite.

<comment><USER52> While technology makes easy jobs disappear, it also makes hard jobs easier. The advent of calculators means grocery clerks can be completely innumerate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I'm all for driverless transportation, but let's face some important facts.

Why didn't we _already_ remove the drivers on trains? The train/metro system is basically a closed system which is _much_ easier to control than a car in traffic. This is a genuine question: why? It looks like a much easier to solve problem.

Second problem will be certainly be fuel. A 20x increase in utilization means at least a 20x increase in fuel, unless the car is _transporting_ something at all times (which basically means car sharing). Sending your car home empty is crazy in terms of fuel.

Legislation is also going to be a hell of a problem, at least in EU.

</comment><comment><USER54> I don't agree these effects are unintended rather than highly desirable benefits.

</comment><comment><USER55> I have said before, driverless cars will end the private car.

First you get your car doing taxi work for money while it would otherwise be parked in your workplace. Then you get a social stratum of people who only ever use other people's cars, because it's simpler than buying one. Then you get commercial fleets of driverless taxis out-competing the per-individual car in the taxi role, until it's not economic to run one. Then you get the collapse of the economic/logistic infrastructure for per-individual cars.

And yeah, driverless taxi fleets will only park to fuel, be serviced, or wait on a fare.

</comment><comment><USER56> This is a far down the road vision. It calls for a huge shift in the mindset of the consumer AND the manufacturer, to say nothing of the society. Then there is the infrastructure and error handling - what happens when it gets a flat tire on its way to pick up the kids after dropping you off?

Lets give it 15 years. 15 years is a long time for technology but not so much for societal evolution.

I can see the driverless car being on the road in 5 years and I see it being used for carpools. But the vision as painted in the post? Yes, I'm a skeptic.

Very interesting stuff though...I can't wait till they hit the road.

<comment><USER57> I think the legal issues are underestimated here.

Who is liable if your driverless Civic drives you into a tree? What if it runs over a pedestrian? Honda? Google? You?

Driverless cars could dramatically reduce the dangers of driving, but it's a lot more complicated if a machine learning algorithm kills somebody than if a mistaken human being does.

<comment><USER58> That's a poor argument.

All it needs is for _someone_ to take liability. If you own the driverless car, then you buy the insurance. If it's leased from a pool, then they buy the insurance.

The software vendor for their part take an over-arching insurance on software errors across thousands of cars. Done deal.

Today if you have a 20 year old your premium is higher. Tomorrow if you have a driverless car, your premium might be low even if you have a 16 yr old. Parents buying a first car might just buy a driverless car for a lower insurance premium & the safety of not having the kid drive!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Speaking of unintended effects, what happens when the government begins to abuse its new capability to geo-fence areas that driverless smart cars aren't allowed to drive into?

Like protest meeting areas.

</comment><comment><USER60> like any progressive technological development it will bring only improvements, including refusing to go to specific places specified by a transmission from central traffic control or automated blocking of doors and delievering you to court/jail/administrative hearing ...

</comment><comment><USER61> All these economic points can be applied to public transportatipon (i.e. trams, trolleys, subway). They also have much higher utilisation of equipment and number of drivers is negligible comparing with the number of passengers. So the problem is the same as [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy) Well, maybe Google can introduce public transportation once again.

</comment><comment><USER62> The biggest opportunity I can see here is Cars as a Service. Basically an automated taxi service you pay $50/month for to use a car whenever you want. You fire up the caas app,order a car, and the nearest one comes and grabs you. The best part: not location dependent. Your membership is good in any city (heck, even any _country_ ). It would be the end of taxis and even public transportation.

<comment><USER63> I imagine this is already possible but with people as drivers instead of machines, you just need some badass coordination in your cellphone app service.

<comment><USER62> Possible, yes, but you have to both buy the cars and pay the drivers, one of the reasons taxis are so expensive (the other being licenses running in the hundreds of thousands of dollars). If we project 5 years down the road to a time when gas prices are even higher, electric vehicles are cheaper and more reliable, and the technology is ready for prime time, I could easily see cars as a service working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Airplanes are not utilized 96% of the time. Most are sitting on tarmacs all night long.

Just like cars will be sitting when it isn't rush hour. There may be a few less cars sold on the margin, but this will not impact things as much as you think.

I could possibly see more rental/share programs, but those exist in big cities and are called cabs.

Which, brings me to a bigger problem which is cabs, those guys are definitely not going to have jobs.

</comment><comment><USER65> It's not about average throughtput, it's about peak throughtput (during rush hours). Big percentage of families will want their cars at 8-9 and 16-17.

So utilisation of cars will never be 90%, more like 45%, which is still big change, I agree.

It's also possible that companies will do the sensible thing and adopt adjustable working hours (many software companies do this already here).

</comment><comment><USER66> I brought this up in Matt Maroon's post about the topic back in January, and he brought up a good point: People like to own their car because it's a moving storage locker.

[http://mattmaroon.com/2011/01/03/google-will-become-an-ai- co...](http://mattmaroon.com/2011/01/03/google-will-become-an-ai- company/#comment-20313)

<comment><USER67> The use case I'm imagining is people going shopping, and wanting to put bags from one store away in their car before going into another. So what if you could summon up a self-driving car, put your stuff in its trunk for a fee, and then call back the same car later with your stuff still in its trunk? It could go be a taxi while you're busy shopping, and not allow other customers to unlock its trunk.

<comment><USER68> Or we'll get a car design with a removable trunk.

<comment><USER8> I think you're spot on.

But I think the removable trunk will be combined with a passenger-less unit that carries the trunk back to your house and drops it off. Sort of a tiny version of container shipping.

<comment><USER67> That sounds like something that might happen in the farther future, but I expect there will be a lot of general-purpose auto-driving cars made before companies start making super-specialized models like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Once we have automated cars why would anyone own one? Cars are the biggest waste of money we have right now. On a house you spend more but you have the potential to get it back or even make a profit. Not so with a car, it's just loss and a lot of that.

The sensible thing to do would be to have cars as a service. Why tie yourself to one type of car when you can just order what ever you need for that specific trip? Why does every family need 2 cars when nearly all our time is spent in one place (e.g. home, the office, the golf course).

Cars as a service can enjoy the same kinds of economies you have with e.g. the phone network. You don't have to have enough for everyone because everyone won't be using them at the same time. You need only worry about peak time, which you even have some control over since you're making the driving schedules.

</comment><comment><USER70> Decouple the drivetrain from the cabin. The drivetrain is automated, and has standard connection types for the personal cabin. So you can have a mobile space that is "yours". Still has all the benefits listed in the article, and handles a few of the problems that "community car sharing" would create.

If a bunch of people are all going the same direction you can pack them into a 10 cabin bus, or a 100 cabin train. When their paths diverge you can have single cabin drivesets routed in advance to the destination. Tailor the drivesets for their intended use/range; short range electrics for small commutes, long range diesels, catenary powered on high traffic areas, perhaps a large multicabin driveset with wings?

</comment><comment><USER71> Ford is kind of already aware of this, see Bill Ford's TED talk : [http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_ford_a_future_beyond_traffic_g...](http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_ford_a_future_beyond_traffic_gridlock.html)

</comment><comment><USER72> I like the idea. If only we had a system of cars, that for a small fee could drive us anywhere we wanted. That fee could be based on the number of kilometres travelled and the time spent in the car. We could call that fare a "taximeter", based on the latin "taxa" and the Greek "metron" meaning measure, together as "taxed metre", as that's a bit long - in time we could shorten it to "taxi".

Then we could have certain cities where only these "taxis" (and other kinds of public-transport) were allowed entry. Normal cars could enter, but would need to pay a special "congestion" fee.

Maybe London could try this out as they have a problem with congestion.

</comment><comment><USER73> Here's a related question: What will cities look like with driverless cars being shared by groups of people? Parking needs will diminish significantly, allowing cities to become more dense, yet because the cost of driving will be reduced (by splitting the ownership costs of cars, by increasing the rate of shared commuting, and by allowing commuters to spend their transit time being productive), demand for urban land for residential areas may decrease overall. So my best guess is that in many cities commercial areas will become more dense, but residential areas could enter a decline. Any other ideas?

</comment><comment><USER74> According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, Americans spend more than 500 million 'commuter hours' per week in their automobiles. Once driverless cars take over this time can be spent on browsing web (clicking ads)

<comment><USER52> That's the most backwards-ass business model I've seen. Google could probably make more money by selling the damn technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Being nerds and geeks, we automatically focus on the numbers: is 96% utilization too high? Will there really be 20x fewer cars sold?

Those exact numbers are beyond the point. But a more realistic number for utilization may be close to 50%: half the time, the car would be on the way back to the next pick up point (or home or office or ....).

One of the main reasons planes have such high utilization is to recoup the high cost of the initial investment. You don't see _every_ plane being utilized 96%; heck, drive by any small airfield and you'll see lots of planes parked under a canvas, seemingly not going anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER15> Another unintended (or maybe intended) effect: cheap cabs.

Without cab drivers, there's no reason for the antiquated medallion system. That would lead to more cabs. Without medallion costs, drivers, tips, presumably cheaper insurance, and more efficient route-finding -- it should also be much cheaper.

With cab-bots, you could also do some awesome things like model the areas and times of greatest demand and make sure they are there immediately. Or, similar to UPS, route to avoid left turns to increase fuel performance.

</comment><comment><USER76> The value proposition here is basically replacing cab drivers.

This offers some really interesting challenges because there should be some sort of optimal routing algorithms that would allow a car to carry more than one passenger at a time.

I am sure Google is already working on something amazing in this regard.

The most exciting thing is the potential to radically reduce transportation costs. The cost reduction won't be an order of magnitude but it would probably be at least half the total cost of transportation we incur now.

</comment><comment><USER77> Two unrelated comments:

\- The most massive impact of driverless cab will be to send all taxi and truck driver to unemployment all of a sudden. Many post workers and pizza guys also nearly after.

\- Google is not the only one working on that. Audi has some very nice driverless tech going on, as do a few other universities. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car>

Edit: formatting

</comment><comment><USER63> I love driving car. Only problem that I have and this could solve is parking in zone where it is expensive and somehow park car somewhere else. But I could possibly solve this problem NOW by paying students or someone to park, and get your car for you. The prize has to only be cheaper than parking expanses.

driverless car cost will be higher than this I imagine.

</comment><comment><USER78> It's funny to note that in the FlashForward novel, the author presents the exact opposite view of the "future world": people buy more and more cars, and since they're auto-piloted, they don't even bother about parking anymore: "drive around the block and pick me up in 30 minutes" Entire traffic jams made of "parked" cars. Amazing!

</comment><comment><USER79> There's an aspect of this that I haven't seen mentioned. It seems trivial but I think it's got to be solved before pooled vehicles like this can work: cleaning the vehicles.

There's no incentive for the individual user to keep a shared vehicle clean. So what happens: squalor, or perhaps a new service industry of grooming self- driving vehicles?

</comment><comment><USER80> You have to wonder if people would even learn to drive manually in a world of driverless cars, maybe only a minority of enthusiasts would want to (cost/time concerns).

Also, if some enthusiasts were perceived to be driving dangerously compared to the computer controlled cars, that all manually controlled cars might be banned.

</comment><comment><USER81> A [nice] motorhome that's driverless would be awesome. Have to be in New York at 9, but live in Philadelphia? Fall asleep in your motorhome the night before and wake up at 8 a.m. already in the city. Not to mention the gas/electricity/emissions benefits from a machine controlling the acceleration and motor.

</comment><comment><USER82> Cars aren't engineered for high use. We'd have to radically redesign the car itself to go 250k miles/year.

<comment><USER83> Are you sure about that? If it's the norm to pay for a share in a fleet of cars, then those cars will probably be owned and managed by a company that will ensure that they get timely preventive maintenance. Yes, there will be changes in how much is reasonable to pay for added durability, but do you have any evidence that cars need to be _radically_ redesigned?

<comment><USER82> Ever been in a taxi with 300k miles on it?

<comment><USER83> What's that got to do with anything? Why should driverless cars be expected to last as many years as current cars? If you're only paying for 20% of the car's lifetime cost, then you're not going to mind if it has to be replaced five times more often. In fact, you'll probably _like_ it - that's why anybody ever leases cars.

It's quite reasonable to expect that it will be economical to pay something like 20% more for the drivetrain to make it more durable, but that's not a radical re-design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Driverless cars seem like a great idea, but I've never seen anyone address the legal/insurance issues.

</comment><comment><USER16> I agree with everything except the last part. Cars will still wear out after the same number of miles.

</comment><comment><USER85> The effects of 20x fewer vehicles in our cities will have enormous impact on urban design and planning. The very shape of our metropolises will be realigned away from the auto-dominated patterns of the last 60 years.

Walkable, livable, green urban cores will become the new standard.

</comment><comment><USER86> Seeing this and the MythBuster's cannonball debacle next to each other gave me a scary chill.

</comment><comment><USER87> [3] - Is all that matters. The industry and their constituents could easily push back driverless cars 20 years, and this is without any catastrophic accidents happening. So I'd say about 35 years before we see driverless cars disrupting anything.

<comment><USER88> Insurance companies matter a lot, too, though they don't get much coverage in the article. Like others, I don't find the arguments for lower overall usage very persuasive, but I could buy them being significantly safer.

If enough statistical evidence accumulates to demonstrate that these are safer than manually controlled cars, look for the insurance companies to impose a severe cash penalty on driving the car yourself. If the difference is large enough, you might find yourself unable to purchase insurance for a manually controlled vehicle at any price.

<comment><USER89> The movie iRobot was an interesting take on such a future.

In a few scenes in the movie, the female lead (the robot psychologist?) reacts in horror to Will Smith manually driving his petrol driven motobike because it has not auto-pilot and 'you realise petrol is explosive don't you?!?'

And after Will Smith has the forced accident in the tunnel (when attacked by the robots), his boss accuses him of unsafe driving because the blackbox reported that he had disengaged the auto-pilot.

So quite conceivably we'll end up in a future where manual car driving is seen in the same light as drink driving or speeding is seen today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> "Yeah, because cars aren't a personal item? why don't we just make it public transportation? oh wait, they already have that. It's called a bus, train, subway, taxi. Sorry I like my gas car, because I can modify it and make it go fast."

What is wrong with people?

</comment><comment><USER91> What happens to people who want to drive the car themselves by choice. How long before the idea of a mere human driving the car is seen as too reckless because automated cars are doing lane merges at surgical precision at 120mph.

</comment><comment><USER92> I wonder what the potential would be for vehicles to be hacked and their destinations rerouted by third parties. Would there be a centralized automation system or would the cars be independently smart and networked?

</comment><comment><USER42> _"And if cars are receiving 20 times more actual use, that would imply that there would be 20 times less cars sold."_

Incorrect conclusion. Cars being used 20 times more will break down 20 times faster. Less might be needed on the road at the same time but they'll break down and need to be replaced at a much faster rate. Over a serval year timeframe the amount of cars turned over will remain roughly the same.

I also wouldn't send my car home to pick up my wife and drive her to work because my fuel bills will skyrocket through all the extra driving around.

The shared resource makes sense. It'll be similar to taxi services that exist now. You call for a driver and the closest shared car will come to pick you up.

<comment><USER93> >Cars being used 20 times more will break down 20 times faster.

Not true if they're owned by big players who professionally maintain them. Want to buy a used LLV (postal truck from the eighties/nineties)? You can't, because they haven't been surplused yet.

Also, cold engines wear much faster than hot engines, so an engine that runs all day does not wear out as quickly per mile as one that's driven a few times daily.

<comment><USER42> Sure, they haven't been surprised but they surely have had enough parts replaced that we can consider then new cars several times over.

You make a good point that a fleets maintained better than the average citizen but they will still break down and still need to be replaced faster that the author is stating. We will still have roughly the same amount of turnover over the course of a decade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> sending your car home for your spouse to use and then back again to pick you up at the end of your day means it's using twice as much fuel on wasted trips with no occupants.

<comment><USER95> You arent seeing the bigger picture here. If you choose this level of efficiency, after getting dropped off at work, 'your car' will simply locate the next closest customer. If you want to spend the resources on your own private car or a more available one, more power to you.

<comment><USER96> But people tend to live in the suburbs and work downtown; so the net traffic in one direction is much greater than the net traffic in the other direction.

<comment><USER97> This would force people to carpool :)

<comment><USER95> or live in locations with better access to these resources

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> Cars will be designed so as not to run over children. Children will stand in front of cars as a prank to cause massive traffic jams and make the evening news.

People will use cars as advertising. You will receive free cars as "samples" and this will cause problems because it will happen too often.

Automotive spam and script kiddies would not be pretty. I'm pretty sure a driver will always have to be behind the wheel.

<comment><USER99> If kids causing traffic jams was a real problem, why doesn't it already happen all the time on pedestrian crossings?

<comment><USER100> Because human drivers have the ability to exit the vehicle and "dissuade" the obstructionist child. In fact, the mere threat of exiting the vehicle has been known to send children running.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> The largest unintended effect will be the massive loss of employment in the transportation industry.

</comment><comment><USER102> Unintended? For me, those were always the main motivation for driverless cars.

</comment><comment><USER103> Nah, people will sell their houses and buy a truck with their home which would follow them around. What we will actually rent is the parking space.

</comment><comment><USER104> he forget to mention the ability to drink and drive legally.

</comment><comment><USER105> read some sci-fi: last chapter of flashforward (the book)

</comment><comment><USER106> Interesting post. However, I think the primary consequence of driverless cars could be more mundane - everyone will end up using cabs/taxis far more often. This is the life I lived in Bombay a decade ago. The parking, cost overhead of a car is so high and rickshaws/cabs are so cheaply and plentifully available, that walking out of your home and hailing a cab to go wherever you want is the best option.

Cabs in the West are expensive because drivers need to be paid more and cartels are at work. If both these costs are eliminated then what works in a country like India is, suddenly, the best option for commuters in the West. Realtime pooling of cab passengers is a possibility, a traveler could be offered a choice of picking a co-traveler for a reduction in fare(or even cash back!) when already travelling in the car.

Families could still own cars, but they will probably pay for insurance on a per-mile basis, rather than a per-month basis, so that the incremental cost of owning a car is minimal. Effectively, you end up owning a cab that only you use and pay cab fare to the insurance company :-) The ratio of cabs to private cars would then be an interplay of insurance costs/parking costs and ride sharing benefits, with cities leaning towards cabs to escape parking costs. So, things wouldn't be too different :-)

One unfortunate consequence could be the increase in suburban sprawl and traffic congestion with driverless cars as people start caring lesser about longer commute times. Automated cars will probably be better behaved in traffic, but the road capacity will be pushed to its limits.

<comment><USER26> Most traffic is caused by the delay in human reaction times, and driverless cars can operate safely at much higher speeds and at much higher densities. Roads could handle _massively_ more traffic if they were only packed with driverless cars.

<comment><USER107> Where the hell do you get that idea?

Most traffic in the US is caused by the lack of roundabouts.

<comment><USER108> Even if this is so, a computer-driven cars can certainly use normal junctions much more effectively than humans. Robots could do this: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vnba7Y86jC4> [lucky driver goes full speed through dense traffic] on routine basis.

<comment><USER107> Seriously doubt it, and I don't want to live in that world...

In any event, it's as likely as seeing people riding segways all over the place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> _Why would a family need an entire car to themselves?_

Because sitting on your own child's vomit is less horrifying than sitting on your neighbor's child's vomit.

I'm similarly excited for the arrival of automated cars (I'll be able to ride my motorcycle with a higher percentage of predictable drivers around me), but there's a point where personal property has a unique advantage.

</comment><comment><USER110> If you can just network the driverless cars up to the existing public transportation systems then we'd have a truly useful device.

Just walk outside your house and a car drives on up, opens its doors, and takes you to the most convenient location to transfer to a public bus, or if economical to pick up other passengers going near your destination.

</comment><comment><USER107> Driverless cars will never go mainstream. It's not something the masses want or need. Just a project for techies to have fun doing for the sake of doing it.

</comment><comment><USER111> It seems that to most Americans, the draw of the driverless car won't be "hey, this is more efficient and is costing me less overall." Rather, I think it will be, "hey I don't have to pay attention in the car anymore, I'll be on my phone playing on the internet the entire way home!!!!!!!" Followed shortly thereafter by, "hey why doesn't this car have the internet in the front seat?"

</comment><comment><USER112> So the effect of a driverless car is going to be a driverless taxi. Why doesn't everyone use a taxi now? I'm sure it would cost less than cars do. But nobody really does the cost-benefit analysis of these sorts of things.

<comment><USER73> Eh, that's doubtful actually. In most US cities (other than, say NYC, SF, and a handful of others), taxi service is expensive and slow to arrive. Parking is free, and cars can be obtained relatively cheaply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER113> post is so good, read it 3 times</comment>


Why this is short - <AUTHOR> http://douglastarr.com/why-this-blog-entry-is-short

<comment><USER2> I've always written concisely. Throughout my grade school years, I had a really tough time writing papers that had a page minimum: because I would always say what I needed to say early on - getting right to the point so to speak.

Now, one could argue that my writing was organized poorly, and that's why I said what I needed to say so early, but I don't know. I feel like I get everything out as quickly as possible.

</comment><comment><USER3> The irony:

> You will choose your words more carefully, and make less mistakes.

Should be "make _fewer_ mistakes"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, fixed. :-)</comment></comment>


Announcing the launch of Windows Server 2016 - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/hybridcloud/2016/09/26/announcing-the-launch-of-windows-server-2016/ <comment><USER2> Has support for HTTP/2

<comment><USER3> And finally ECDHE_RSA with AES_GCM support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I haven't seen a Windows server in quite some time, but then I haven't worked for "normal" companies for ages. How ubiquitous is it in SMEs?

<comment><USER5> Quite ubiquitous in healthcare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there a new version of the free Windows Hyper-V Server?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-announces-the-general- avai...](https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-announces-the-general-availability- of-windows-server-2016-and-system-center-2016/)

<comment><USER7> Thanks, we updated the link from the Microsoft Ignite live stream ([https://ignite.microsoft.com/#fbid=RtDV16ZEdMb](https://ignite.microsoft.com/#fbid=RtDV16ZEdMb)).

<comment><USER8> The official link is [https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/hybridcloud/2016/09/26/a...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/hybridcloud/2016/09/26/announcing- the-launch-of-windows-server-2016/)

and this is important because it's not actually GA.

From that link:

"Availability

Windows Server 2016 is available for evaluation beginning today and will be on the October price list. Volume licensing customers will be able to download fully licensed software at General Availability in mid-October."

<comment><USER7> Thanks! We updated the link again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Did they put the start menu back? Whoever decided the mobile-style start screen made sense on a server product...

<comment><USER10> It's the Windows 10 start menu. It's basically still the mobile-style start screen from Windows 8/2012, but doesn't take up the full screen, and has a vertical list of apps on the left-hand side.

Classic Shell should continue to work if you'd like to restore sanity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> According to wikipedia it will be released between September 26 and 30, 2016

<comment><AUTHOR> Wikipedia is not a news website, it's a tertiary source, so it will definitely not be up to date :)

Check this out: [https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-announces-the-general- avai...](https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-announces-the-general-availability- of-windows-server-2016-and-system-center-2016/)

<comment><USER11> That is a much better source thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is ReFS bootable yet? Can Ubuntu for Windows be installed on this? Is there anything else about this that I should care about?</comment>


Show HN: Learn Japanese Vocab via multiple choice questions - <AUTHOR> http://japanese.vul.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all! I built this app originally to help myself memorize japanese vocabulary through bruteforcing my mind as I can't find any other japanese quiz app with a UI like this on the web.

Feedback and criticism are much appreciated, thanks for trying this!</comment>


The myth of $10,000/lb launch costs - <AUTHOR> http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=301

<comment><USER2> That article is 11 years old. What's the purpose in linking to it?

The Falcon 9 can lift 29,000 lbs to LEO for US$54 million. That's $1,900/lb.</comment>


Ask HN: What the best way to optimize images in S3? - <AUTHOR> Amazon services, third parties, or processing on your own server?<p>By optimising, I mean resizing and compression for web consumption. <comment><USER2> For this sort of work I found using a lambda function with a trigger on s3 upload works very well, aws-lambda-image seems like a popular project to use instead of writing your own code [https://github.com/ysugimoto/aws-lambda- image](https://github.com/ysugimoto/aws-lambda-image)

</comment><comment><USER3> Personally, I prefer to perform such optimizations on 'load' rather than on 'store' (as recommended by dgelks). This is particularly useful if you may want to change your optimized image format.

You would have a canonical lossless image stored in S3. When a user makes a request to your CDN, it calls an origin server (assuming a cache miss) that transforms the canonical images into an optimized form.

Any basic WSGI, FCGI, CGI application behind NGINX will probably be sufficient.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have a microservice setup to process my s3 images, on the fly and when they're uploaded.</comment>


Google AdSense: Banned for Life? - <AUTHOR> http://mattrefghi.com/blog/2011/08/google-adsense-banned-for-life/

<comment><USER2> If you've been banned from Google AdSense and you're deadset on getting back in, create a new legal entity with its own Google account. This complies with Google's TOC. There are higher costs of course, but presumably you'd do it if the revenues would exceed the costs.

<comment><USER3> That's corporate personhood working for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find it pretty amazing that until this day Google Adsense is pretty much the only mature and profitable option that publishers have world wide and that other platforms suck in any compared aspect.

I was too banned from Google, after 3 long year of profitable partnership, earning to me ~80k$, and to Google more than double than this. One day, a short email without any explanation landed in my inbox telling me they closed my adsense account, and as always with Google, you can talk to your cat and he will be more listening than them.

I believe this will change only when Facebook will launch their own search engine and made their ads available out of FB. Days are near, but still...

</comment><comment><USER5> In most cases I'd think affiliate ads would be a better way to go than AdSense anyway.</comment>


"Occasionally surprise the novice, or you'll continually surprise the expert." - <AUTHOR> http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.language/2002/11/msg12621.html

<comment><USER2> Here's how another popular scripting language handles this:

        >>> a, b = 123, 456
        >>> a + b
        579
        >>> c, d = '123', '456'
        >>> c + d
        '123456'
        >>> b + c

        Traceback (most recent call last):
          File "<pyshell#4>", line 1, in <module>
            b + c
        TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +: 'int' and 'str'

I must confess that none of these behaviours surprised me when I first encountered them.

<comment><USER3> _TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +: 'int' and 'str'_

What a silly error. Obviously "123" + 1 is "23", "123" + 2 is "3", "123" + 3 is "", and "123" + 456 is "ùÏÚ0óÊÌ°qÛ=æPªuök6~;;\ðÚÕKµM¦OñÁ®"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think that Wall misunderstands the policy of least surprise and I even think Matz might agree with the principle of the quoted statement (although he probably wouldn't agree with the overall point Wall is making). From an interview:

"I wanted to minimize my frustration during programming, so I want to minimize my effort in programming. That was my primary goal in designing Ruby. I want to have fun in programming myself. After releasing Ruby and many people around the world got to know Ruby, they said they feel the way I feel. They came up with the phrase the principle of least surprise. But actually, it's often misunderstood.

...

Everyone has an individual background. Someone may come from Python, someone else may come from Perl, and they may be surprised by different aspects of the language. Then they come up to me and say, "I was surprised by this feature of the language, so therefore Ruby violates the principle of least surprise." Wait. Wait. The principle of least surprise is not for you only. The principle of least surprise means principle of least my surprise. And it means the principle of least surprise after you learn Ruby very well. For example, I was a C++ programmer before I started designing Ruby. I programmed in C++ exclusively for two or three years. And after two years of C++ programming, it still surprised me."

<http://www.artima.com/intv/ruby4.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> Advocating principle of least astonishment for Perl is like a giraffe trying to breakdance.

<comment><USER6> I disagree. perl made a point of adopting a lot of idioms from well-known languages. Some of it's more inscrutably named internal variables came from awk, for example. Whatever perl's vices, indifference to least astonishment isn't among them. Admittedly, it's target audience was UNIX types. I can well imagine a good deal of astonishment, along with some other emotions, from those not in the target audience.

<comment><USER5> I agree that many constructs (s///, tr//, ``) will be familiar to someone with Unix background, but I'm not sure if they would qualify as a novice (many CS first years are unfamiliar, and in fields like bioinformatics -- where Perl happens to be the most commonly used language -- it's a rarity).

But anyway, what about $_ and a host of other special variables? Pulling arguments to functions out of nowhere? Using regexps for simple string operations? Strings not being array? Using a special comparison operator for strings (without complaints when == is used)? length() not working on arrays (again, no warning) and $# returning index of last element rather than length? 'if' not being able to take a single statement? 'Last' instead of 'break', 'next' instead of 'continue', 'continue' doing something else?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Addition and concatenation have different properties: concatenation is not commutative. So the problem is not the types, strings vs int, but different operations. In a language that puts an emphasis on principles like haskell, I find "++" a elegent syntax for concatenation, but otherwise I find that Python's approach of using "+" and throwing a type error is good enough.

<comment><USER8> I see the overloading of operators to do fundamentally different sorts of operations as a mistake in all cases. That's not to imply that (in a language with infix syntax) operator overloading is bad, but that it should be used to add the same kind of operation to a new situation. Overloading + to work with a fixed-point math library makes sense. Overloading + to do concatenation does not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I agree with Larry Wall on this particular point, but I'd love to see further examples illustrating the principle here.

<comment><USER10> Take a look at anything in Clojure. Sexps, homoiconic language, immutability & macros don't seem like good choices at first. Once you have some experience writing code, you'll see that they're killer features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I Added some Eggs to my Toast today, and all I got was Toast&Eggs. Nothing Exceptional.

<comment><USER3> You shouldn't have gotten Toast&Eggs. You should have gotten (Toast&Eggs)*2 + (Toast^Eggs).

<comment><USER11> or ((Toast&Eggs) _2 &(Toast^Eggs))_2+((Toast&Eggs)^(Toast^Eggs))

<comment><USER11> ((Toast&Eggs) _2 &(Toast^Eggs))_2+((Toast&Eggs)*2^(Toast^Eggs))</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Java 7 Fork-Join Calamity - <AUTHOR> http://coopsoft.com/ar/CalamityArticle.html <comment><USER2> This article smells strongly of ad hominem attack. The professor who "hasn't walked in the shoes of application programmers" is, of course, Doug Lea, the driving force behind the current java.util.concurrent package. The performance comparison smells of cherry-picking: parallel add over a Long array, really? The complexity criticism sounds a bit like "I don't understand this code! It must be bad!" He accuses the code of bit-twiddling. Oh my.

<comment><USER3> I don't see any place in the article where it says, "The author is dumb, therefore the code is bad," or anything remotely like that. The article does observe that the code is great from an academic but not professional standpoint, but it gives reasons why that is the case. There's nothing ad hominem about the article.

If anything, your comment is more of an ad hominem -- rather, the positive version of the same, an argument from authority -- with the implication that F/J is probably good since Doug Lea wrote it.

> The complexity criticism sounds a bit like "I don't understand this code! It > must be bad!"

All complexity criticisms sound this way. Some are true and some are not, and we must attempt to separate which is which. But dismissing the criticism because of how it sounds without actually investigating the claims yourself is not good. "This sounds like X and is therefore dumb" is not a valid refutation.

It seems like you are trying to undermine some minor points in the article and claim that the whole thing is bunk as a result. What about addressing the major points instead. Can F/J scale across thousands of cores? Is work- stealing task-management actually valid in Java? Is the performance actually good? Is monitoring and stall detection available? Would a better approach use the Unsafe extension less? Etc. Otherwise your comment will not add much except for misleading weak-minded people into thinking the article is baseless.

<comment><USER4> As scott_s notes below, I'm not sure I agree with the premise that core libraries need to be understood _much less modified) by the average programmer. I'd rather they be correct and highly optimized, and I see no evidence in the article to suggest that F/J is not. Perhaps this will be viewed as another appeal to authority, but I've looked at the F/J code (briefly) and parts of java.util.concurrent (in more depth), and they look to be written in a similar style. Not the easiest stuff to parse, no, but people seem to be getting along with java.util.concurrent just fine, despite the fact that all the 'ivory tower' claims in the article apply just as well to that code.

Moving past that, there are some serious misunderstandings displayed in the article that make me nervous about accepting the rest of it at face value. For example:

> _Only the Operating System (O/S) or a pseudo O/S can manage Tasks (whether > they're called tasks or processes is all the same thing.) The best an > application framework can do is manage Threads.*

WTF? Tasks and processes are not the same thing in this context (yes, they are interchangeable when talking about a kernel scheduler). In the context of programming models, tasks are just reasonably independent units of work, usually thought of as within the same overall application. For examples of application frameworks that get along just fine managing Tasks, see TBB, OpenMP 3.0, Cilk and variants, Microsoft TPL, etc.

> _The F/J Framework structure precludes scaling. The entanglement of client > call/server processing, the spare threads necessary to help with the join() > waiting problem (above), as well as the work stealing code (threads need to > serially search for work among all deques) only works well on a small number > of processors. This design can never scale to hundreds or thousands of > processors. The overhead would kill the benefits of parallelization._

Work-stealing is _designed_ to be more scalable than a centralized task queue by reducing contention. The idea is that, statistically, you have to serially search a very small number of neighbor queues before finding some work to steal. There are scenarios where a (logically) centralized queue wins, which are well described in the literature, but equating work-stealing with non- scalability betrays a lack of understanding of how these things actually.work.

This paragraph also echoes a theme throughout the article, which is that F/J does not fit into the author's mental model that any parallelism framework should be "enterprise-grade" and should work for a huge farm of machines. I argue that it's just fine for solutions to exist, and indeed to be present in the JDK, which prioritize simplicity and speed over logging, fault tolerance, and monitoring, and which remove the overhead of a strongly separated client- server model. Furthermore, is there evidence that the enterprise features couldn't be layered on top of the proposed framework? That would seem to be the best of both worlds.

Apart from these factual concerns, the _huge_ degree of repetition (honestly, this article could've been 1/4 the length) and the complete lack of evidence for any of the performance and scalability claims (the table shown should not convince anyone) are red flags for me. The fact that the author happens to be highly commercially motivated to spread FUD is icing on the cake, but isn't necessary to figure out that these arguments should be taken with a huge grain of salt.

That said, there are probably some good suggestions in here for how to improve F/J. I think a lot of them are better suited for a larger piece of "parallelism middleware", like what the author sells, than to a language's standard library.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is the author of this article also the author of a competing fork-join framework? Although it shouldn't invalidate the technical criticisms, an undeclared conflict of interest is a good way to sabotage your credibility.

<comment><USER6> Yes: <http://www.coopsoft.com/JavaProduct.html>

I hadn't realized that. I had assumed he was referring to others' work in this article. It's very bad form to compare your work to that of others without identifying that the work is indeed yours.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My personal disappointment is the lack of expressiveness.

Here is a C# LINQ example:

      using System.Linq;
      files.AsParallel().ForAll(file => ProcessXML(file));

To achieve something similar in Java 7, one could start on perhaps with improving the java.util.Collection interface, or appropriate abstract children, by introducing the asParallel method that the Collection implementations could implement. One obvious problem I see is the lack of lambda support in Java 7, so one would have to pass an anonymous class into forXXX(..) instead which is a bit more clunky.

<comment><USER2> That falls under project lambda (and corresponding work on the collection classes), which won't appear until Java 8. I agree, it would have been better sooner.

<comment><USER5> It doesn't seem like a good idea to ship a "bad" parallel framework in Java 7 and then ship the "good" one two years later in Java 8.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> While I'm not necessarily disagreeing with everything in this article, there are an awful lot of assertions made that could really use some citations and illustrative examples to back them up.

The fact that the author is associated with a fork/join competitor and yet never acknowledges it also inflates my skepticism by a long way.

</comment><comment><USER8> Given the author's reported experience I'm surprised there aren't more posts from him on the mailing list ([http://altair.cs.oswego.edu/mailman/listinfo/concurrency- int...](http://altair.cs.oswego.edu/mailman/listinfo/concurrency-interest)) where this library, and all the other juc changes, have been discussed for years.

</comment><comment><USER9> Coming from C background, there is OpenMP, with with a bunch of #pragma omp parallel for (and others) can easily turn suitable processes into data- parallel ones (for example lots of image processing could be sped up this way). On top of this, if you don't link with OpenMP it stays the old way (serializable).

</comment><comment><USER10> I found the condescension towards "Average Java programmers" offputting.

<comment><USER6> I also found those two sentences unclear. I can't figure out if he meant that average Java programmers can't maintain and extend the Fork/Join framework, or that they can't use it. If the first, I don't expect average programmers of any language to be capable of maintaining or extending core libraries.</comment></comment>


German spy agency secret list of harmful URLs - <AUTHOR> https://bpjmleak.neocities.org/

<comment><USER2> BPjM is not a spy agency - roughly it translates to "Inspection agency for material harmful to the youth".</comment>